Oh my god, it’s already that time of the month again, the month was fulfilled with unfocused work, many different projects, many different experimentations and my attention divided into classes, capstones and personal projects.

This month I will have to narrow down what I’m working on at school and start focusing more to get more interesting projects going on, but at the time I’m just enjoying the experience of being able to work on games all day every day and being able to explore different things.

Setting these aside, here is a brief overview of what I worked on this month!

We Broke O.R.B.Y

I briefly talked about this project last month, this little game had 6 people working on and we did a two-level 3D platformer prototype for the Research and Team Dynamics class. In the video, you can see the second level being played by me!

My main contributions to this project were the character controller and the camera, I know the camera looks bad, I’m sorry.

Jumpy Jump

And this is the result of the “Make a Jump” assignment, I tried copying the exact same feel as Super Mario Bros 3 and added a few of my own touches! So it has a similar feel but not quite the exact same.

I learned a lot by reverse engineering a game, I made many improvements on my previous platformer engine and these changes actually were incorporated in Midnight Journey.

Top Down Adventure

After the jump assignment, my next task is creating a top-down adventure, I talked to some people who went through this task and read the documentation and realized I could make something very based on Pokémon, which is something that is on my backlog for a long time already.

So I had this idea of dungeon exploring roguelike where the combat is based on Pokemon and I have to do it in 1 month. Sounds like a very sane plan!

D.S.L.R.

One of the nice things of this month is that I had a Summer Break (that lasted a glorious whole week) and I wanted to make a prototype this week. So I got into my backlog of mechanics and found D.S.L.R.

D.S.L.R. is a game where you are a Forensic Photographer and have to investigate murders, the trick is, the pictures you take of the crime scene shows the crime scene at the moment of the crime.

The prototype is just about taking pictures and seeing them on the camera, but hey, it’s something.

Midnight Journey

So finally we arrive at Midnight Journey, the game I’m really working on as a project, my goal with this one is to be a full platformer game and I’m aiming at about 1 hour of gameplay, just something so I can release. At this point, I really feel like I need to release a platformer commercially.

I will write more in-depth Devlog posts about this one, these are going to be done on Fourth Dimension devlog! But I will link everything here.

I decided to make Midnight Journey very heavy on Wall Jump, you are going to explore a tower and it makes sense to have a lot of verticality.

Here is a quick list of some things I’ve done this month for this project, I won’t be getting into much detail because this post is damn long already!

• I’ve created the Pause Menu, which will feature a map of the tower, the menu changes where it appears based on where the character is on the screen, I thought this would be a nice touch. I’m planning to have an animation on the character where they would be looking at a map or something like this.

• Created the Main Menu finally! I want the “created by Guilherme de Oliveira” thing on the main menu to make me seem more important lol

 

 

• Made some Level Design for the initial segment of the game! This would work as a tutorial and aims to teach you how to use the jump effectively.

• I’ve added InControl and reworked the Input system for the game;
• Reworked the platformer engine, incorporating improvements from Jumpy Jump;
• Reworked Wall Jump so now it feels better;
• Added a Dialogue System;
• Added an Environmental Notes System;
• Started writing the notes the player will find on the environment.

Summarizing it all, a lot of things were done this month, there are still some other things that are under NDA and I can’t really be talking about it here, but I feel like I didn’t focus on anything, I’m fine with that at the moment because I’m working on 3 capstones, classes and personal projects, but in 1 month I will have to decide on just 1 capstone and then I believe I will be able to have more quality and not so many quantities.

Next Month

This month I realized I should start working on a portfolio, I should have a decent portfolio and keep it constantly updated, I also want to do more tech posts on my other blog where I get into code specific stuff and the line of thought of how I developed some features.

This is why I have gifs or videos for everything, I am making some kind of library of media to use on my portfolio.

So next month I want to have:

• 1 Portfolio Piece: I want to write about the development of platformers games, I’ve worked on 6 platformers mechanics to this day: Secludere, Journey to the Light, happily(never)after, which were game jam games, JumpyJump, which was an assignment and Midnight Journey and Freshman’s Quest, which are games that are under development – I want to write about how I first did it, how iterating on it was important and how the code looks like after all the iteration, it will also have some handful tips on how to make a platformer feel good.
• 1 Tech Blog Post: For one of the capstones I got to work on a Billiards prototype, and getting the stick rotation around the ball was something that involved some interesting math and code stuff, I want to write a tech post about that.